Lego Maniac

Just to confirm that I’m a loser, I’ve been doing this thing for the last four years that I call “Sci-Fi Saturday.” I wake up early, brew up a huge pot of good coffee, make Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls (which have been a Saturday breakfast tradition since I was ten), and then settle in for sci-fi wankery.

The cornerstone has been Battlestar Galactica, but there’s also Stargate and the previous week’s Doctor Who. If there’s a period where none of those shows are airing, then I marathon any number of old shows which I have sitting around on disc. No matter what, I have to watch at least an hour of sci-fi on Saturday morning.

Then, if my weekend job doesn’t demand otherwise, I lounge around in my stinking pajama bottoms and threadbare robe and start drinking around noon. Which leads to me going to bed around 9pm Saturday night and having weird sci-fi dreams.

I want to confess this to the Internet-At-Large, because I’m quite concerned about my plans to set up all my old Legos. As if Sci Fi Saturday’s weren’t bad enough, now I want to recapture my childhood and build a huge Lego town in my bedroom.

As my storage cleanout progresses, a carload at a time, I’m working through all the phases of my life. From when I left home in 1992, to when I moved out of my Bethesda apartment and into my grandparents back rooms in 1998, to when my mom died in 1999 and I stuffed her entire two bedroom townhouse into the storage units, to when my grandparents sold their house in 2006.

The storage units aren’t quite in that same order, though. I have two units hidden in a vast sea of warehouses out in Germantown, Maryland, and my goal is to eliminate one or both of them. Though I’ve already filled up my apartment with books and furniture, so it looks like all I’ll be able to do is consolidate.

One thing I’ve greatly enjoyed is throwing stuff away. Five boxes of mom’s estate shit (which was a 15 month ordeal) are, now, trash. I’ve been cheerfully shredding page after page. There’s a mountain of paper to go through, but it’s powerfully satisfying as each page of my mother’s life turns into Office Depot’s Level Three Security confetti.

I’ve also done away with the bulk of my colossal VHS collection – now mostly replaced, thanks to seven years of Netflix and compulsive Amazon shopping when drunk.

I’ve found only one box of Legos so far. I know there are many more. Once recovered and back at my C-Level Housing, I plan to put together the old Town System, circa mid 1980’s when Legos were cool. Maybe I’ll get a webcam and film wild Lego police chases through the packed streets. Vrooooom! Just like when I was a kid. Except, I suppose, I’ll be well drunk. Which will be a necessary state of mind if I actually do film myself playing with Legos.

Reassembling my old Lego town sounds tiring, really. I also hauled all of my mom’s records out of the storage unit and, to firmly lock myself down as an over-educated 30-something with little ambition, now spend much of my time playing records and drinking in front of a dusty Panasonic stereo.

Pulling myself together enough to rebuild Lego Town might not be within my grasp, but I do want to try. When I was a kid, I had a table that was about six foot by twelve foot, covered with a well laid-out town system. Parks, services, houses, dump. This was before Lego started to look more like Duplo and released mega-sets like the airport and so on. It was rare for a set to be larger than one square.

My town had a superhero. I’ve forgotten his name, sadly, but it doesn’t really matter. He ran the gas station by day and, at night, he’d go out and run over criminals with his death car. He didn’t have any super powers. Just driving around and slamming into people.

The cops hated him, so they’d all pile into their old school European-style police cars (Lego has since become more Americanized) and would chase him all over the town. Usually the chases would end in the death of countless innocent citizens and a colossal, building-shattering crash. Our hero would always escape, to rebuild his death car behind his gas station and let the dust settle.

Once, the bad guys all teamed up and destroyed his gas station. His dramatic escape was followed by a depressive stay in the trash pile out behind the hospital for several days until he figured out who the ringleaders were and, one by one, stalked and brutally murdered them, leaving their dismembered corpses on the street outside the police station.

I was a pretty cool ten year old, eh?